May 14, 2012Facebook’s Prospects May Rest on Trove of DataBy SOMINI SENGUPTASAN FRANCISCO — Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, has managed to amass more information about more people than anyone else in history.

Now what?

As Facebook turns to Wall Street in the biggest public offering ever by an Internet company, it faces a new, unenviable test: how to keep growing and enriching its hungry new shareholders.

The answer lies in what Facebook will be able to do — and how quickly — with its crown jewel: its status as an online directory for a good chunk of the human race, with the names, photos, tastes and desires of nearly a billion people.

Facebook’s shares are expected to begin trading as early as this week. Already, lots of investors are scrambling to buy those shares, with giddy hopes that it will become a big moneymaker like Google. Because of that high demand, Facebook is expected to increase its offering price from its initial range, giving the company a valuation possibly as high as $104 billion.

In the eight years since it sprang out of a Harvard dorm room, Facebook has signed up users at breakneck speed, kept them glued to the site for longer stretches of time and turned a profit by using their personal information to customize the ads they see.

Whether it can spin that data into enough gold to justify a valuation of as much as $104 billion remains unclear.

“We know Facebook has an awful lot of data, but what they have not worked out yet is the most effective means of using that data for advertising,” said Catherine Tucker, a professor of marketing at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “They are going to have to experiment a lot more.”

Analysts, investors and company executives can rattle off any number of challenges facing the company. As it works to better match ads to people, it has to avoid violating its users’ perceived sense of privacy or inviting regulatory scrutiny. It needs to find other ways to generate revenue, like allowing people to buy more goods and services with Facebook Credits, a kind of virtual currency. Most urgently it has to make money on mobile devices, the window to Facebook for more and more people.

All the while, its ability to innovate with new features and approaches — to “break things,” in the words of Mr. Zuckerberg — may be markedly constrained once it has investors to answer to.

“They are going to have to think about whether they can continue with the motto ‘Done is better than perfect,’ ” said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst at the Altimeter Group. “When you’re operating as a public company, life is very different. We haven’t seen that play out yet. It’s going to take a few quarters to figure out what a public Facebook is going to look like.”

Skeptics point out that the company’s revenue growth showed signs of slowing in the first quarter of 2012. And a Bloomberg survey of 1,253 investors, analysts and traders found that a substantial majority were dubious about the eye-popping valuation Facebook was seeking. “It’s a risky asset. No doubt about that,” said Brian Wieser, of Pivotal Research Group. “Google was less risky.” No matter. Mr. Wieser says he thinks that Facebook is worth $83 billion and that its revenue will grow by at least 30 percent for the next five years.

The comparisons to Google are inevitable. When that company went public in 2004, there were so many doubters that the company lowered its offering price to $85 a share. It closed at just over $100 on the first day of trading, and now sells for more than $600. Facebook is farther along than Google was in terms of revenue, having brought in nearly $4 billion last year, or $5.11 a user, compared with Google’s $2 billion in 2003.

One Facebook investor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of market regulations as the offering draws near, noted that when Google went public it already had a clear business strategy. By contrast, he described Facebook this way: “They have built an incredibly valuable asset — as opposed to a business they have executed well.”

The most pressing issue for Facebook executives may be the mobile challenge. Already, over half of Facebook’s 901 million users access the site through mobile devices. In regulatory filings, the company says mobile use is growing fastest in some of Facebook’s largest markets, including the United States, India and Brazil. Facebook goes on to acknowledge that it makes little to no money on mobile and that “our ability to do so successfully is unproven.”

There is not much space on mobile screens to show advertisements. And Google and Apple, two of Facebook’s biggest rivals, control the basic software on most smartphones, which could make it harder for the company to make inroads there. Facebook’s response to this challenge so far has been to aggressively acquire companies focused on mobile, including Instagram, for which it paid $1 billion in April. But it warned in a revision to its offering documents last week that the mobile shift meant it was adding users faster than it was increasing the number of ads it displayed.

What Facebook already has — more than any other digital company — is a spectacularly rich vault of information about its users, who cannot seem to stay away from the site. Americans, on average, now spend 20 percent of their online time on Facebook alone, thanks to the ever-growing menu of activities the company has introduced, from playing games to sampling music to posting pictures of baby showers and drunken escapades. Some 300 million photos are uploaded to the site daily.

How Facebook exploits its users’ information — and how those users react — is the next reckoning. David Eastman, worldwide digital director for the advertising agency JWT, said Facebook would need to give marketers more data about what kinds of users click on what kinds of advertising, and about their travels on the Internet before and after they click on an ad. Most brands want to have a presence on Facebook, he said, but they do not quite understand who sees their pitches and whether they lead to greater sales.

“They need to make the data work more,” Mr. Eastman said. “They need to provide deeper data. Right now the value of Facebook advertising is largely unknown.”

While the bulk of Facebook’s revenue comes from North America, it is banking on international growth. The company has expanded its global footprint so rapidly that four out of five Facebook users are now outside the United States. It is the dominant social network in large emerging markets like Brazil and India, though it shows no signs of penetrating China — where it would face not only government censorship but stiff competition from homegrown social networks.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who has studied Mandarin, signaled his ambitions to crack the vast Chinese market as far back as 2010. He suggested that Facebook would first try to advance deeper into markets like Russia and Japan before it took on a country as “complex” as China.

With international growth comes international regulatory headaches. Facebook already faces audits in Europe on whether the company is living up to promises made to consumers about how it uses their data — and now, a stringent new data protection law. In India, it has been sued for spreading offensive content. And in the United States, it faces privacy audits by the Federal Trade Commission for the next 20 years. In its offering documents, Facebook repeatedly warns of legislative and regulatory scrutiny over user privacy, “which may adversely affect our reputation and brand.”

Maintaining brand loyalty is excruciatingly difficult in the Internet business. Across Silicon Valley, investors are plotting the next big thing in social networks. Already, the clock may be ticking for Facebook.

“There is no consumer-facing Internet brand or site that ever keeps consumers’ attention for more than 10 years,” said Tim Chang, a managing director at Mayfield Fund. “It is not hard to imagine that in 10 years, people are going to be off of Facebook even.”

Mr. Zuckerberg has an answer to that. In the video for investors released this month, Mr. Zuckerberg hinted at the ambitions he had for the company. Facebook, in his vision, will hook itself into the rest of the Web, making itself indispensable. Already Facebook serves as a de facto Internet passport, allowing users to log in with their Facebook identities and explore millions of other Web sites and applications.

“I think that we’re going to reach this point where almost every app that you use is going to be integrated with Facebook in some way,” Mr. Zuckerberg says in the video. “We make decisions at Facebook not optimizing for what is going to happen in the next year, but what’s going to set us up for this world where every product experience you have is social, and that’s all powered by Facebook.”

I've only had 1 FaceBook account since 2008 and got dinged for entering the wrong password many times for years and years but today was the first time I actually got locked out (seems like permanently this time), and was prompted to provide photo ID & all kinds of bull____.

All I really wanted to do was log in to find out more about Rachel Maddow's Emmy nomination and did she win it? If so, wanted to congratulate her. Can't do that If I'm locked out.

I'm in agreement with all concerned that mark zuckerberg should indeed be summoned to testify before Congress regarding the Russia investigations and what role did FaceBook play during the 2016 presidential campaign run for the record just to make sure that there was no coordination/connection with those dubious accounts from Russia.

Next month mark zuckerberg was scheduled to appear before Congress to explain to the American people how involved was Facebook in the 2016 presidential campaign run but has declined to testify and will send his lawyer instead.

I strongly urge all interested in this matter to relay to the investigating Committee to issue a subpoena directly to Mr. zuckerberg to speak and be heard before Congress.

Here's a question for the Congressional committee members to ask when it convenes regarding social media's involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign run:

Considering that digital social media can be used to undermine American democracy which poses a national security risk affecting the accuracy & influence of our democratic elections, would you[facebook, twitter, snapchat, etc.] be willing to shut down all services until we find a solution to our problem?

If not, would you[facebook, twitter, snapchat, etc.] be willing to accept any consequences, violations and/or penalties in our findings that implicates your company's involvement with a foreign power during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign run?

It was Cambridge Analytica that was hired to steal unsuspecting HEF members private messages for ted cruz's 2016 presidential campaign. The idiot [cruz] even went as far as plaigerizing entire sections of my pitch in his announcement speech to begin his presidential run.

Cambridge Analytica also coordinates and collects with Facebook to steal unsuspecting users info for drumpf.

These are ______ing good for nothing, cheating thieves. These M/Fers literally steal from the poor & give to the rich.

I'm in agreement with all concerned that mark zuckerberg & ted cruz should indeed be summoned to testify before Congress regarding the Russia investigations and what role did FaceBook play during the 2016 presidential campaign run for the record just to make sure that there was no coordination/connection with those dubious accounts from Russia.

Both characters have a lot of things in common. One is the creator of an addictive electronic bulletin board service and the other is the creator of the highly addictive drug, Jet.

Anyway...

Will Ferrell says he can 'no longer, in good conscience' use Facebook

by Sarah Salinas

Thursday MARCH 29, 2018

Comedian Will Ferrell has joined the small chorus of public figures signing off of Facebook for good.

"I know I am not alone when I say that I was very disturbed to hear about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of millions of Facebook users' information in order to undermine our democracy and infringe on our citizens' privacy," Ferrell wrote in a Facebook post.

He said he'd leave the page live for 72 hours in order to let the post circulate. That puts Ferrell's Facebook expiration date around 2 p.m. Friday.

"In this day and age, with misinformation running rampant, it's important that we protect the truth, as well as those who work to bring it to light. I can no longer, in good conscience, use the services of a company that allowed the spread of propaganda and directly aimed it at those most vulnerable," Ferrell said. (Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Facebook is still reeling from reports that research firm Cambridge Analytica improperly gained access to the personal information of more than 50 million Facebook users. The social media giant has in recent weeks lost billions in shareholder value and made several changes to its privacy policies.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that he hadn't seen a "meaningful number of people" deleting Facebook after the leak. Still, some public figures have abandoned the platform.

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk said on Twitter that he'd be deleting the Facebook pages for Tesla and SpaceX.

An unrelenting ‘Frontline’ documentary wants you to know that Facebook is not your friend.

by John Anderson

The overarching theme of “The Facebook Dilemma”—an aggressive, indignant, illuminating two-nighter presented by “Frontline”—is the blissfully amoral way a social-media site has morphed into a sociopolitical evil. But what viewers will also come away with is a sense of something else—something entirely relevant to the situation: That Mark Zuckerberg is the worst company spokesman in the history of corporate America. If he told you the sky was blue, you’d wonder what his agenda was.

And it’s Mr. Zuckerberg’s innate sense of shiftiness that perfectly reflects his company as profiled by a “Frontline” team that includes reporters Anya Bourg and Dana Priest, and James Jacoby, the film’s director, writer, producer and on-air presence. Mr. Jacoby goes in with all the hard questions and has enlisted a group of eight former senior Facebook staffers to address his concerns—ranging from hate speech to Russian election interference to Facebook’s alleged complicity in the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar to its weaponization by the likes of Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

He was also “given”—he makes this clear a couple of times—five members of Facebook’s upper management to answer his questions. That they come off like deer in Mr. Jacoby’s headlights is revealing in itself: Their answers are mealy-mouthed at best, and the defensive posture they assume, and their evident fear, indicates a company unable to cope with, or confront, the corruption that has accompanied its absolute power in the social-media marketplace.

There’s not a lot of TV that’s genuinely “must see,” but “The Facebook Dilemma” qualifies. Part 1, which airs Monday night, concerns itself with the warnings that arose, very early on, about the dangers Facebook posed to democratic institutions. Tuesday’s Part 2 deals with the company’s response, or lack thereof, to charges that it has enabled “fake news” and the disruption of electoral politics. It’s no small thing that the program clarifies vital issues raised about Facebook—algorithms, for instance—so obscure to so many. Or that it so concisely tells its very disturbing story.